SCI’s Erroll Southers, right, and Frank Quiambao address the delegation of foreign journalists. (Photo by Deirdre Flanagan)
More photos from the event are available on Flickr »
By Matthew Kredell
Erroll Southers and Frank Quiambao from the USC Price School of Public Policy’s Safe Communities Institute (SCI) hosted 15 journalists from 14 countries on April 25 as part of a reporting tour conducted by the U.S. State Department Bureau of Public Affairs’ Foreign Press Center focused on the theme of “Youth and Countering Violent Extremism.”
“I was encouraged to see a group of international journalists asking the hard questions about their own industry, why certain stories are reported the way they are, and if things are being covered the way they should be,” said Southers, director of Homegrown Violent Extremism Studies at SCI. “I think that’s really interesting when you have individuals who are open to feedback on how we perceive the stories they are writing about our discipline.”
The tour – which also included stops in Washington, D.C., and Denver – was intended to generate international coverage on how U.S. localities are re-integrating youth who may have been radicalized or incarcerated. Many of the journalists went home and reported about their experience in print or broadcast.
Southers explained that he would like to see media coverage of violent extremism have more parity. While only 37 percent of the domestic extremist killings in the U.S. this past year involved Muslims, he said it seemed that the overwhelming majority of the articles regarding countering extremism seemed to be about ISIS and Muslim extremists.
Journalists participating in the discussion came from a wide range of countries spanning four continents — including Canada, Germany, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Kyrgyzstan, England, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Trinidad and Tobago, and Tunisia.
“I was most interested in how people in the United States have started to distinguish between a person who is simply an extremist and a person who is a violent extremist,” said Umer Farooq, a correspondent for Pakistan’s independent magazine Herald. “This approach will be very helpful in my country, where a vast majority of people have an extremist lifestyle. They are fanatics, but they are not violent.”
Another topic, appropriate for the media audience, was Southers’ column that appeared the previous in the April 24 issue of USA Today.
In the column, Southers suggests that the U.S. reconsider its policy toward radicalized Americans to allow for bringing them back from the terrorist fold. This approach would both encourage family members to report loved ones for whom they are concerned and lead to learning about extremist radicalization from those who were attracted to, but disengaged from, that life.
“It’s interesting to hear the challenges the U.S. is facing and what successes they’ve had from these academic leaders who are really in the know,” said Dylan Robertson, a freelance journalist for the Postmedia newspaper chain in Canada. “It’s helpful to get the perspective of someone who doesn’t have a specific interest in one thing or another. It has also been really interesting to hear the different perspectives of media in other countries.”
Southers reported that as many as 250 Americans have tried to travel to Syria, with 40 returnees. His field research indicates that these are usually young people with traits in common — they want to do something important, to belong, to be seen as relevant and to have someone care about them. It’s no different than someone who might have joined a street gang in the past, except now they can go online and find a thousand people who feel the same way.
“We’ve found that the government will not solve the all of the problems on its own,” Quiambao, director of SCI, told the group. “The government needs to be part of the team, but it’s really the community that has to do it. We look at this as a global community. We’re facing a lot of the same problems. I hope that, with all of you and the people who have come here in the past from other parts of the world, we can start a movement to a whole-of-community approach toward homegrown violent extremism.”
This was the sixth foreign group to visit SCI to hear about homegrown violent extremism efforts through the U.S. Department of State, though typically the groups are made up of public officials and practitioners rather than media.
“When you consider that SCI has been up and running for less than one year, and we’ve become a regular stop for the U.S. State Department on violent extremism, we could not have ever wished for that as an outcome, much less this quickly,” Southers said. “I am humbled. The team is just elated that the State Department thinks enough of us that they put us on their list of places to go, and every time a delegation comes here, we have potential for international research, opportunities for collaboration, and we learn an awful lot from these people.”